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Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Head of State - Dragon King Expansion's Tyrant & Survivors; Continued Campaign

The Tyrant, IMHO, basically defines a stylish use of the swagger stick.

This was a fun variation on my previous set, going with a near-monochrome look, with just a touch of purple in there to vary things up in those blues and blue-greys.

The dragon-armored survivors got a more normal skin tone than the special ones, and no glowing eyes. Being a mix of dragon tech and regular tech, some got glowy blue energy, while the rest got regular lanterns. The bow was from the Flower Knight, which I thought looked suitably ornate for including with them.

Continued campaign

Year 6a
We came home and there were more cracks in the ground- we were all relieved when our new shield guy didn't fall in the hole.

And during that we were able to discover both smelting and blacksmithing, which was pretty cool since year 6 is definitely the earliest we've actually gotten a blacksmith (rather than just smelting), though it didn't leave us with resources beyond getting a pick.

We then had the first of two fantabulously game-y Lion hunts:

We knew the Bone Witch was coming to town this year, so we took three deaf guys and one we hated, against a level 1 lion as the most controllable. We got Bat Around early, then variously kept shearing off moves carefully until we only had the one move which would controllably lower our insanity by 1 each fairly weak attack, and got everyone down to 2 or fewer insanity and killed off our liability by shoving him in front of the lion.

We unfortunately got a lion paw that made one of us up to 3 insanity, but the one insane guy managed to just scrape by without re-summoning the Witch.

Year 7a
We got Inner Lantern after we'd focused so heavily on getting good kids, then we got some more good kids. Also, we finished a leather set and got some harvesting tools.

We weren't really sure what to do, and didn't want to fight another level 2 antelope since they're kind of a slog, so decided to try gaming a Lion again, this time to try to force it to make us smarter.

With persistent hit location fixing and intentionally weak slaps all around to try to cycle through cards we didn't care about, we just barely managed to isolate it so it had a lost paw at one health left, which got us our first two Ageless survivors ever! And one of them was a complete newb, who was now a single easily achieved fighting art away from a constellation, at her first age up. So, that's exciting.

Year 8a-11a
Okay, I got bad at writing things down- lots of late/overtired games here.

We lost one of our ageless kids near a constellation due to a bad hunt event.

We fought our dragon dad again.

We got the plague, twice.

We kept not getting paint despite roughly 50/50 odds every year (starting to take sub-optimal innovations just to cull the deck and try to push the odds better), and kept not really being ready to make more serious fights despite crazy armor and good damage output. I'm not positive we need to be this conservative, but right now our kids are more valuable than resource output.

We set up a number of nice breeding matrices to make extra-punchy kids who were all close to constellations with one major stat up required in most cases. Kids became really complicated, in general, actually. Despite all that, we kept barely maintaining 15 people due to lots of kids but also lots of random deaths.

...In fact, other than getting better and better at making kids, this whole redone campaign has been a bizarre amount of extremely slow progress regarding gear. I guess with all the training, we've also gotten very good at making Fist & Tooth and Shield masters.

Years 12a-14a
The big things in these years was that we tried our first hunt in a very long time against a Phoenix, and remembered just how mean higher-level guys were without Dash. And we finally got Dash. And Bloodletting, specifically to get rid of the recurring Plague and its bad luck.

We also got to the point of maintaining >20 population, and have a current setup for kids to hit Storm (weapon-focused) mastery in 3-4 years whenever we make them. Which are an obnoxious few years, but then we have super kids.

Also, apparently I got a lot worse at keeping up with records for this game. Think it has to do with having more work.

At this point, I've realized that I've written a ton of KD session reports, so I'll probably be finishing out this campaign in much simpler summaries since I've kind of run though more of the colorful exploration of the game. Either case, mostly highlights.